Re: highlighting and fontification

[Ken McGlothlen <mcglk@serv.net>]

"Edward J. Sabol" <sabol@alderaan.gsfc.nasa.gov> writes:

| Personally, I believe that having two spaces at the end of a sentence is an
| antiquated convention born in an era of typewriters and fixed-width fonts.
| With the advent of computers and proportional spacing, the two-space
| convention is virtually useless and people are moving away from it.
| Professional typesetting for books, etc. has never followed it to begin with.
| Pick up any book, and you won't find the spacing between sentences to be any
| larger than the spacing between words.

(I realize that I'm answering this kind of late.)

I must respectfully disagree.  It's there, but it's smaller than two normal
spaces between words on the same line.  In justified text, it was considered
better to expand the space between sentences "faster" than the space between
words; in English-style typesetting, uniform spacing was considered "lazy."
(Of course, the *French* never followed this convention, but c'est la vie.)

Even TeX, possibly the most careful computerized implementation of typesetting
known to date, took this into account.  In extremely tight lines, by default,
the spacing was uniform, but as the line got looser, the space after sentences
would stretch three times faster than the space between normal words.

TeX, of course, had a \frenchspacing command that would revert to the French
style of uniform spacing.

But at least in English and often in German, larger spacing after
end-of-sentence marks was common, accepted, and considered good style.  And
that is what led to the two-space convention in typewriting.

Obviously, I still prefer it.  Call me a traditionalist, I guess.  :)

							---Ken